On Sat, Aug 25, 2001 at 10:51:28AM -0700, Eric Murray wrote:
Too bad no technical people were called upon to explain how "group reply" works and why many people send copies to both the original poster and to the list without intending any direct communication with the poster that they're replying to. Of course that would not have served Robb's purposes...
Right. Jim's only witness called in his defense was, well, Jim. Let me speak up in defense of replying to the poster and the list in at least some cases. Obviously replying to a long To: line of a dozen people is just poor manners. But there are at least three advantages that come to mind when copying the original poster: 1. Email sent individually to someone reaches them faster than when replying to the list. I've often had half-day lag times in the past with cypherpunks. 2. Email sent individually to someone will reach them when the list is offline. This happened to me earlier this month when my cpunx node was offline for three or so days. 3. In my case, I subscribe under a different (but obvious) address than my well.com one. If copied on a reply, I'll see it sooner than than if I open the cypherpunks folder on my *nix machine. Naturally some folks (John, Tim) have expressed a preference not to be copied on messages. -Declan